[Feature Request] Plug-in framework

[rgegriff]

I think that there are a lot of features that would be great to have; but don't make sense for everyone and don't necessarily fit the vision of the project perfectly.

I am imagining some sort of plug-in system that would allow the installation of applets, roughly analogous to widgets used by other launchers; but with an interface to unlauncher that encourages a minimalist UI and consistency with the rest of Unlauncher. These extensions could be accessed via a carousel pattern by swiping left or right from the app list.

I kinda want to sketch out some ideas of what that could look like.

Properties of the plug-in "applets":

• Minimal UI descriptions
  • Applets should return a description of their desired UI that is composed primarily of text, simple layout information, simple monocolor icons, and a list of events that can be sent back to the template when various bits of text are clicked.
• Strongly event driven
  • Applets will return a text-based layout to UL on launch, and will respond to events sent to them by UL by returning updated layouts.
• Stateless
  • Applets should not maintain their own state. Instead, recreating any state needed on each event.
• Parameterized configuration
  • Applets should respond to a specific event with an object describing configuration options
  • Configuration of Applets should take place in the Unlauncher settings.
  • All other events sent to applets by unlauncher should include a configuration object in the parameters

Example applets:

• calendar
• Displays calendar information in a scrollable widget by communicating with the Android Calendar Provider. Tapping the title launches the default calendar application.
• Todo.txt
  • Displays, sorts, and filters the contents of a given todo.txt file. Allows filtering based on context and project to be configured. Tasks can be marked/unmarked as done by tapping.
• App list
  • The home app list could be implemented as an applet. It is configured with up to Six apps, up to six labels for the apps, and three enableable quick-buttons
  • this could serve as a sort of foldering or app/group mechanism by simply adding multiple differently configured instances of the app list applet

[khwolf]

Why not use the existing Android-Widget-System? Let the user decide what kind of Widget best fits for them.

You could exchange the two list of apps and the clock/date part of the display with areas where widgets could be docked. Yet if you do so there is not much difference to a "normal" launcher left. There you would just need a widget to list your favorite Apps in text-form and it could look quite similar to unlauncher...

[TobiTenno]

this also seems a bit out of scope for the launcher, since the point is being minimal. it seems like you'd have better experience using minimal apps to do a lot of those applets/links/etc from your main apps list if you need to use them that frequently